How to Share Your Movie from iMovie

Your iMovie movie or trailer is complete, you’ve saved it to your MacBook's hard drive, and now you’re wondering where to go from here. Click Share on the application menu bar, and you’ll see that iMovie can unleash your movie upon your unsuspecting family and friends (and even the entire world) in a number of ways:

iTunes: Send your movie to your iTunes Library as a movie.

iDVD: Create a new iDVD project automatically, using your movie.

Media Browser: Make your iMovie project available within other iLife '11 applications, in five different sizes suited to different display devices.

YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo/CNN iReport: Yep, you read right, you can send your iMovie directly to any of these websites! Can it get more convenient than that?

MobileMe Gallery: Share your movie with the world at large by posting it within a Gallery on your MobileMe website. (Note that Apple’s MobileMe service will be discontinued in June of 2012.)

Export Movie: Create a copy of your movie on your hard drive in one of five different sizes.

Export using QuickTime: Create a QuickTime movie with your project using the QuickTime encoding engine (allowing greater control over the export process and the attributes of the finished movie file).

If you use this option, any computer with an installed copy of QuickTime can display your movies, and you can use QuickTime movies in Keynote presentations as well.

When you choose a sharing option, iMovie displays the video quality for the option and makes automatic changes to the movie attributes. (For example, choosing Tiny reduces the finished movie as far as possible in file size, and the audio is reduced to mono instead of stereo.)

Need to take a movie offline or stop sharing it? You can remove a project from iTunes, your iLife Media Browser, your MobileMe website, or the YouTube web site from the Sharing menu as well. Just click the corresponding Remove From menu item. (Of course, you can share the project again at any time.)

If you’re worried about permanently reducing the quality of your project by sharing it in a smaller size, fear not! When you choose a sharing option to export your movie, your original project remains on your hard drive, unchanged, so you can share a better-quality version at any time in the future!

After you adjust any settings specific to the desired sharing option, click Publish (or Save) to start the ball rolling.